“I noticed this morning that a group of our Landsberg friends have been given their freedom this morning. These include...Schubert, Jost and Nosske. Schubert confessed to...supervising the execution of about 800 Jews...(referring to the order to clean up Simferopol)...Schubert managed to kill all the Jews (by Christmas 1941). Nosske was the one the other defendants called the biggest bloodhound....
Noel, Noel, what the hell.”
Benjamin Ferencz in a letter to Telford Taylor, December 1951

More trouble for the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, this time from France of all places. Writing about the omission of Jews from postwar French commemorations of the deportations carried out by the Germans, Robert Gildea (Marianne in Chains) writes,

More from Gildea on Communist vs Jewish "memory" and commemoration, in this case concerning the La Lande camp, outside the village of Monts near Tours, from which 100s of foreign Jews were sent to Drancy, then to Auschwitz, after which Communist women were incarcerated there; Gildea describes how in the 1980s Communists prevailed upon the local municipality to commemorate the camp with a plaque - and how the Jewish community in Tours responded:

Tempers on both sides finally cooled - yet some Communists continued to complain about Jewish "hijacking" of the commemoration of the victims of the Nazis at La Lande:

Some Communists criticized Jewish claims with the dismissive observation that locals "don't remember any Jews who took part in the Resistance."

(Gildea, pp 393-396)

Again, in France, we see the supposed Jewish Communists, whom revisionists argue were the propagators of a Holocaust myth, protecting their own status as resistants, valorizing their own suffering over that of other groups including Jews, and openly combatting Jewish memory of the Holocaust. This is the very opposite of what should have been the case according to revisionist versions of the machinations of Judeo-Bolshevism.

Also a capitalist gene, a commie gene, a gene for voting Tory in the UK, an EU gene, a subversion gene, a gene for liking birdhouses, a blind obedience and a mindless patriotism gene, a gene for requesting absentee ballots, a gene for faith and a gene for atheism, a book-burning gene, a convertible autos appreciation gene, a hat-wearer gene . . . yeah, I forgot about all those genes.

Sailor Haumea wrote:Lately, antisemites have been trying to claim that ethnic Jews are inherently predisposed to subvert their countries, as in it's a genetic trait. Therefore, communism is inherently Jewish.

All this goes back to that drivel written by Kevin MacDonald.

Right, so disposess Baron Rothschild of his communistically accumulated art collection... If we're talking NS, basically all one is talking about is a politically organized pack of larcenists who'd thieve anything not bolted to a concrete floor.

And if we're talking about deniers and NS apologists, basically what we're talking about are cheerleaders, obsessive conspiracists, and BS artists. There are days, most of them actually, like today, when I simply cannot take this stuff seriously. Where's poosh?

Sailor Haumea wrote:Lately, antisemites have been trying to claim that ethnic Jews are inherently predisposed to subvert their countries, as in it's a genetic trait. Therefore, communism is inherently Jewish.

All this goes back to that drivel written by Kevin MacDonald.

The alleged inherent enmity of Jews to non-Jewish statehood (with or without asking the egg-or-hen question) used to be so widespread a meme that you can see people like Beilis' lawyer Karabchevsky repeating it.

Sailor Haumea wrote:Lately, antisemites have been trying to claim that ethnic Jews are inherently predisposed to subvert their countries, as in it's a genetic trait. Therefore, communism is inherently Jewish.

All this goes back to that drivel written by Kevin MacDonald.

The alleged inherent enmity of Jews to non-Jewish statehood (with or without asking the egg-or-hen question) used to be so widespread a meme that you can see people like Beilis' lawyer Karabchevsky repeating it.

Here:
The Jewish question in Russia has always been a painful place, not only for our statehood, but for the public. The Pale of Settlement and all sorts of legal restrictions, paralyzing the possibility for the Jewish able-bodied masses of assimilation and organic familiarization with the interests of Russia, created within the state itself irreconcilable and very dangerous enemies of our state regime. On this basis, there were also flourishing demoralizing methods developed by the administration, which is obliged to enforce a fractional regulation of such artificial inequalities. The Jewish mass, from which the "support" of the throne and the ruling classes disdained fastidiously, was often poor and often was the victim of government experiments in the form of unscrupulously dictated pogroms (for example, the Chisinau pogrom at Plehve) and, at the same time, the Jewish moshnas of the worst speculators, the help of state thieves' deliveries and equally thievish exchange and bank scams, jingled powerfully, pierced their way resolutely everywhere where it was necessary to corrupt and weaken power, or to break the law. Intelligent Jewish youth, especially painfully suffering from such a statement in Russia "Jewish issue", naturally, sought to increase the flow of bloody-terrorist riots. In the public sphere, it was the legal inequality of the Jews that led to the development of only two extreme, devoid of meditation and impartiality, relations to the "Jewish question." The well-known public elements were totally uncompromising anti-Semitism, who did not tolerate the very spirit of the Jewish nation, approving of pogroms and the most ridiculous repressions; the best consciously were Judeophiles, in the broadest sense of the word, disdainfully, even criticizing certain negative features and personalities, to humiliate themselves before striking a recumbent. A silent agreement on this subject, not always and not all, was interpreted and understood correctly. Opponents of the Jews described him as a fear of Jewish dominance in the sphere of material relations, while other Jewish circles would not mind to see this as just a weakness and an involuntary recognition of the superiority of Jewish culture. Under the guise of such sentiments, for example, the Russian beautiful speech was cluttered with impunity in everyday press by foreign-Jewish quirks and words, and the sphere of business and material and economic combinations and relations, almost without a fight and due competition, was put at the disposal of Jewish businessmen. The legal lack of rights of the Jews, which obliged the Russian intelligentsia, for purely moral reasons, to considerable passivity in the evaluation of even clearly negative phenomena, was completely sanctioned by some solemn apology for the Jews. Thanks to this state of affairs, and with the vague softness of the Russian people, the closed unity of Jewry in Russia was a mighty force. This force, precisely in view of its legal lack of rights, could not have resulted in anything other than a revolutionary force that was corrupting our statehood. Jewry in general is inclined to be the rust of all statehood. It invisibly, but relentlessly decomposes it. Not having its own state (territory, in this sense of "fatherland"), every Jew naturally smiles more to be a "citizen of the world" than a humble subject of that or other power. And to be a subject of the state, where his disenfranchisement was clearly advertised (as in Russia), and a humiliating percentage discount was applied even to education, is clearly unbearable. Russian Jewry naturally strove with all means and efforts to throw off the yoke of legal slavery. Now the Jews themselves do not hide their wide participation in the preparation of our "great" revolution. One, artificially, Shcheglovitovsky justice, created, the process of the ill-fated Baileys (not to mention the previous pogroms), which the shortsighted authorities meant to "finish" all Jewry, was, through measure, enough for the revolutionary incitement of Russian Jewry. If Dostoevsky's prophecy came true, and the Jews "destroyed Poccia," it remains for the Russians themselves to take into account this cruel lesson in history and try to resurrect it. One legal cruelty and moral public flabbiness for the state's existence is obviously not enough. "

“I noticed this morning that a group of our Landsberg friends have been given their freedom this morning. These include...Schubert, Jost and Nosske. Schubert confessed to...supervising the execution of about 800 Jews...(referring to the order to clean up Simferopol)...Schubert managed to kill all the Jews (by Christmas 1941). Nosske was the one the other defendants called the biggest bloodhound....
Noel, Noel, what the hell.”
Benjamin Ferencz in a letter to Telford Taylor, December 1951

Muraru's paper in the Microhistories collection shows how the Romanian retreat from Bessarabia and North Bukovina in 1940, when the provinces were incorporated into the USSR, led to pogroms, organized, prepared and partly carried out by the army, railway administration, gendarmerie, and other officials. More than 1000 Jews were massacred in these 1940 actions.

Muraru's argument is that the attacks on Jews at this time were rationalized by those carrying out the actions using Judeo-Bolshevik clichés, in large part targeting the Jews as scapegoats for the Romanian loss of territory to the USSR. This was because the retreat was so poorly executed by the Romanian authorities and such a national humiliation that Romanian officials deflected blame to a convenient target, the Jewish population already victim of anti-Semitic campaigns. According to Muraru, the Romanian Communist party was a tiny, illegal sect during the period, with 100s of members - in the Judeo-Bolshevik narrative, however, 10s of 1000s of Jews suddenly became Communists and sold Romania down the drain.

Muraru argues, further, that the much larger massacres in 1941, during which Romanian Jews were driven into Transnistria, were also justified as revenge for the 1940 retreat, quoting from a Romanian information document on one particular action, carried out "in the name of the humiliations that the regiment was submitted to during the 1940 evacuation."

Good but brief material on Communist prosecutors and courts in papers by Grabowski (Poland) and Solonari (Romania) in the Microhistories collection; also. somewhat related, Muraru says that in Romania state officials destroyed files that might have implicated perpetrators who had since joined the new Communist regime.

Last, Kornbluth contributed a full paper on postwar prosecutions in Poland fleshing out the points that the justice system during the late 1940s was not solidly Communist and in fact employed many anti-Communists, that the courts (up to the Supreme Court) vacillated in applying the August Decree; that in many cases there were reductions of charges, lesser punishments for those convicted, or outright acquittals of people who'd participated in "Jew hunts" or turned Jews over to Polish and German authorities during the war; and that the courts were sensitive to local populist opinion protecting former perpetrators - in Gomulka's later words, demonstrating that it was "a wise politics that knows how to forget."

All this runs strongly counter to revisionist implications of Communist courts advancing some "Jewish case" or narrative, Communist witch hunts conducted on behalf of Jewish interests, and tarting up of evidence and claims for genocide.

In Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust, Kopstein and Wittenberg assess explanations for the pogroms that occurred during the summer of 1941. I have read just the overview of research questions, methods, and conclusions and the background chapter on the kresy during the interwar years. The authors take up the following explanations for the violence: Jewish economic competition, anti-Semitism, revenge for Jewish support of communism, political threat/Jewish nationalism, political threat/ethnic tolerance.

I will write more on the authors' reasoning after I've read the relevant chapters but wanted to give their high level conclusions, as these conclusions are relevant to this thread:

* Jewish economic competition: strength of evidence is medium, more in Ukraine than in Poland
* anti-Semitism: strength of evidence is medium
* revenge for Jewish support of communism: strength of evidence is low
* power threat/Jewish nationalism: strength of evidence is high
* power threat/ethnic tolerance: strength of evidence is medium

Specifically, of the thesis that local pogroms against Jews aimed to gain revenge (for Jewish support for communism or Jewish participation in Soviet administration after the Soviet invasion of September 1939), the authors write, "We see . . . no evidence that sympathy for communism led to pogroms" (p 20). This doesn't mean that Kopstein and Wittenberg don't see evidence for some Jewish preference for Soviet over German rule or that they don't find examples of "Judeo-Bolshevik" rhetoric or enflamed charges of blame but rather that such attitudes, in their view, harken back to pre-occupation stereotypes and that local pogroms in summer 1941 were unrelated to factors like a locality's communist vote, number or % of Jews serving in the occupation administration, etc (pp 4-6).

This tangential conclusion reached by Kopstein and Wittenberg about the role of communism in interethnic violence in the kresy may be controversial.

Later I will come back to the full argument of Kopstein and Wittenberg against the claim that Jewish support for communism or the Soviets can explain violence in 1941 against the Jews in the kresy. For now I will note the following conclusions (which are based on sophisticated statistical analysis) about the influence of support for communism among non-Jews in the region:

* support for communism among non-Jews (e.g., significant votes for Communist lists in elections) had "an immunizing effect" on a locality's propensity to have violent pogroms against Jews - that is, pogroms occurred where communist support was minimal to lacking) (cases: in Volhynia, localities that did not have pogroms had 6x the support for Communist lists in previous elections to those that had pogroms; in eastern Galicia one town, Draganówka, with a 15% Communist vote, acted collectively to save Jews threatened by a pogrom nearby; even in Belorussia, where during the interwar years "support [for communism] was low everywhere," it was 6x as low where there were pogroms as in places that did not have a pogrom; Kopstein and Wittenberg cite a study of Moldova in 1941 by Dumitru and Johnson which reaches a similar finding, exposure of the local population to communist ideology accounting for the absence of pogroms after Barbarossa

* this negative correlation - support for communism by non-Jews vs likelihood of anti-Jewish pogrom - is exactly the opposite of what the "Judeo-Bolshevism" thesis claims, which is that areas most welcoming to the Soviets, for example, were those where Jews were blamed and attacked by locals

* the reasons for the immunizing effect of communist support in an area concern, were first, the communists were "non-ethnic," and they emphasized class difference and class struggle, not ethnic differences and rivalries; second, communist ideology was in fact internationalist and universalist, giving priority to solidarity across ethnic groups; third, as an effect of communist universalism, in more communist localities "intercommunal solidarity with Jews" grew stronger; and fourth, the Communists themselves were well organized and used violence against their enemies (e.g., those who might start pogroms) effectively

This post focuses on how Judeo-Bolshevism figures in the argument Kopstein and Wittenberg (hereafter: K&W) make about the occurrence of anti-Jewish pogroms in the wake of Operation Barbarossa and summarizes key points they make about supposed Polish revenge for Żydokomuna. K&W argue that, whilst the resentment amongst Poles for supposed Jewish collaboration with the Soviets in the kresy during 1939-1941 existed long before and during summer 1941, it is not an explanation for the spasms of Polish (or Ukrainian) anti-Jewish violence that summer.

Background

K&W say of the stereotype of Jewish welcome for the Soviets into Poland in the fall of 1939 that a common trope is that

the Soviets were met by the Jews with relief (. . . as “the lesser of two evils”), by the Ukrainians with a measure of hope (for genuine autonomy and ethnic advantage), and by the Poles with a good deal of fear.”

In the view of K&W, despite its overgeneralization, this shorthand is “probably appropriate [for] the average reaction”; a “minority of Jews and Ukrainians (and a smaller number of Poles) greeted the Soviets enthusiastically” (pp 87-88). K&W cite the case of Szczuczyn where Jews were prominent among those giving a warm welcome to the invading Soviets in September 1939 (p 74). Beyond this initial reaction, K&W look at the ethnic dimensions of the Soviet occupation including the relationship of Jews to the communists and the place of Jews in the occupation regime.

Support for Communist parties was not large in the kresy, and, when it came to Jewish embrace of communism, “[c]ontrary to popular belief then and now, Jewish support for communism was minuscule at the mass level” (p 15). OTOH a “not insignificant number of Ukrainians and Belarusians . . . supported the Communists” and even accepted assistance before the war from the Soviets. Taking the case of Belarus K&W explain that “at the mass level, the Communists did not attract many votes from Jews – the strongest supporters were to be found among the Belarusians” (p 66).

Jews supported a number of Jewish-oriented parties: Dominant were the General Zionists, who focused on advancing Jewish national interests within Poland. The wing of the General Zionists led by Grünbaum were more confrontational; to the east, the General Zinoists led by Reich were more fearful of provoking Poles and Ukrainians and more prone to accommodation. Orthodox Jews, including Hasidic Jews, supported Agudas Yisrael; this party was traditionalist, opposed to Jewish secularist parties, and in favor of loyalty to the Polish state. The socialist Bund had little presence in the kresy as the region had only pockets of industrial workers (e.g., Bialystok, Boryslaw – but, whilst labor Zionists and the Bund competed for support in Bialystock, in Boryslaw the Zionists predominated); the Bund collaborated with the Polish Socialist Party. There was a small Yiddish party, the Folkists, emphasizing a Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation within Poland. During the interwar period the Revisionist Zionists (Jabotinsky's party), emphasizing creation of a Jewish state in Palestine over national goals within Poland, emerged. In this party landscape the Communists figured scarcely at all.

Most of the Jewish parties collaborated with other minority parties (Ukrainian, Belarusian, German) in the Bloc of Minorities, to run slates of candidates. The General Zionists led by Reich and some Ukrainian parties declined to collaborate and ran their own slates. The Bloc of Minorities performed well electorally, alarming Polish nationalists.

Service in the Soviet-occupation administration

Prior to the Soviet occupation, government in the region “had been completely dominated by Poles, but in [these] regions Jews and especially Belarusians [now] took up strong positions in” government, public administration, and the police.

A sample from the Bialystok region of the 9,000 to 12,000 people working in state administration after the Soviets occupied the area, 3,900 were Belarussians, 3,104 were Russians, 1,420 were Jews, and 613 other nationalities. K&W cite one small city where Jews were brought into the government for the first time but, still, the % of positions held by newly appointed Jews was less than the Jewish % of the population (p 74).

In fall 1940, Soviet authorities in Minsk ordered that more local Poles by brought into the state administration. K&W write, “The state administration and civil service, which had earlier been ‘owned’ by Poles, were now in the hands of a multiethnic political elite” (p 60). Among those now running the local occupation governments were also many officials from the USSR (p 88). In this sense, nationalist-oriented Poles were big losers.

Across the kresy with the launching of Barbarossa, like others in the Soviet apparatus, Jews who had participated in the Soviet occupation government tried to flee and many succeeded, leaving only a minority of the most active collaborating Jews in place as the Germans entered the region.

Soviet measures of control and oppression

Arrests of locals during the Soviet occupation were numerous, amounting to 10s of 1000s of arrestees. Reasons for arrest included support for anticommunist movements, membership in other illegal organizations, economic crimes (e.g., speculation), illegally crossing the Soviet-German border.

In western Belarus, the Soviet authorities arrested nearly 45,000 people during the occupation. Of these 49% were Poles, 24% were Jews, and 18% were Belarussians – numbers which don’t suggest any group was singled out or privileged. (p 59) In western Ukraine the Soviets arrested over 66,500 people – 22,000 Poles, 23,000 Ukrainians, and 13,000 Jews (“Almost 20 percent of arrests were Jews, a percentage roughly double their proportion of the population” – p 88). In Belarus, Belarusians were favored over the other ethnic groups (p 80).

Jews, who played a dominant role in the economy of the shtetls and other towns of the region (especially in commerce), suffered greatly from measures against private enterprise and people of affluence.

Jews suffered alongside Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and others under the occupation: the Russian language was imposed, elites were targeted and suppressed, Jewish-owned businesses were nationalized or closed, Jewish and Christian religious institutions were shut down.

The NKVD was, of course, an important organ in the institution of Soviet rule in the kresy. It recruited “from all ethnic groups.” Jewish communists were among those compiling enemies lists. (p 42) In Szczuczyn, for example, NKVD agents arrested town officials, wealthy Poles, some members of the intelligentsia, and resistants. The NKVD also managed prisons in which 1000s were murdered (see below).

Deportations

K&W describe four waves of deportations of groups of people from the kresy (pp 59-60):

1st, February 1940: encompassing landowners, foresters, and others
2nd, April 1940: families of jailed individuals, people in hiding, or people who had fled
3rd, June 1941 [there’s a typo in the book]: people who had fled into the kresy from Germany in 1939, that is, “primarily . . . Jews”
4th, in late June 1941: a planned deportation of people involved in the underground as well as landowners and officials – this wave was not completed due to Operation Barbarossa

Among those deported were also people who’d been identified as nationalists or opponents of Soviet rule. In one town, from which 130 individuals were deported to the Soviet east, 29 of the families were Jewish, mostly from the local elite. In western Ukraine during the April 1940 deportation “Jewish politicians and Zionist leaders” were among those sent to the Soviet interior (p 88).

Most of the 20,000+ prisoners held in occupation prisons were also sent east – and nearly 9,000 of those held by the NKVD were murdered in local prisons (p 89).

Discussion

Anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in about 10% of the places where Jews and non-Jews lived side by side in the kresy. The most important factor, according to K&W’s statistical analysis, for the occurrence of pogroms was “power threat” – the sense of threat felt by the Polish (and Ukrainian) population in areas where Jewish nationalist aspirations were strong: in summer 1941 “pogroms were most likely to occur where there were many Jews, where those Jews were nationalist (Zionist) in orientation, and where some . . . non-Jews were ethnically tolerant” (p 114). The other critical factor was democratic (electoral) politics. In such conditions, nationalist oriented Poles (and Ukrainians) were likely to use violence to defend their political power and to suppress Jewish claims to equality.

K&W review possible hypotheses: economic competition, revenge for support of communism, anti-Semitism, Ukrainian nationalism, and power threat. Whilst K&W identify power threat as the most important hypothesis, they find that economic competition, anti-Semitism, and Ukrainian nationalism all played a part in the motives for the anti-Jewish violence. The only factor that is not significant – and for which there is a negative correlation to anti-Jewish violence – is revenge for Jewish support of communism.

Nationalist Poles, who sought an ethnically defined state, were threatened by civic equality of the Jews. All the parties in the Minority Bloc had wished during the interwar years to be part of the government, “but they were never given the chance.” Not a single member of any of the parties in the Bloc was ever brought into the governing coalition during the interwar years. “Poles nevertheless considered the Jewish vote for nationalist parties as proof of the Jews’ unwillingness to integrate into Polish political life.” One factor that “mitigated” the “sense of threat” felt by Polish nationalists was “the presence of a sturdy communist organization that advocated for a nonethnic, universalist politics” (p 83). In most of the region, except in Volhynia, given the weakness of the communists, this condition was absent.

It was where a large number of Jews lived and when “parties advocating national equality between Jews and non-Jews (Zionists and, to a lesser degree, [followers of Pilsudski]),” not where Jews had joined the Soviet occupation or benefited from it, that the likelihood of anti-Jewish violence in the kresy was strong (p 100).

K&W argue that, whatever part economics and avarice, revenge for communism, and anti-Semitism played in causing anti-Jewish violence, “It is clear that Poles and Jews were polarized long before the outbreak of war” (p 65); “[t]he perception of Jewish ‘collaboration’ . . . was shaped by political and social polarization that antedated the arrival of the Soviets” (p 75). There is “no support for the hypothesis that pogroms were revenge for Jewish support for communism.” As we’ve seen above, K&W conclude that “areas where Communist sympathy was strong among non-Jews were not fertile ground for those wishing to instigate anti-Jewish violence” (p 66). Communist violence was a reality but it was aimed at class enemies.

I’m not sure where else to plug this in but Kotkin reports that during 1937 and 1938 the NKVD reported 1,575,259 arrests and 681,692 executions. Kotkin believes the actual number of dead is closer to 830,000. This is footnoted to a report from 1953 from “Genrikh Iagoda” by Vinogradov. There is also a note about a commission from 1962-1963. Kotkin notes this is only for the NKVD and not by the regular police.

“I noticed this morning that a group of our Landsberg friends have been given their freedom this morning. These include...Schubert, Jost and Nosske. Schubert confessed to...supervising the execution of about 800 Jews...(referring to the order to clean up Simferopol)...Schubert managed to kill all the Jews (by Christmas 1941). Nosske was the one the other defendants called the biggest bloodhound....
Noel, Noel, what the hell.”
Benjamin Ferencz in a letter to Telford Taylor, December 1951

“I noticed this morning that a group of our Landsberg friends have been given their freedom this morning. These include...Schubert, Jost and Nosske. Schubert confessed to...supervising the execution of about 800 Jews...(referring to the order to clean up Simferopol)...Schubert managed to kill all the Jews (by Christmas 1941). Nosske was the one the other defendants called the biggest bloodhound....
Noel, Noel, what the hell.”
Benjamin Ferencz in a letter to Telford Taylor, December 1951

Jeffk 1970 wrote:I’m not sure where else to plug this in but Kotkin reports that during 1937 and 1938 the NKVD reported 1,575,259 arrests and 681,692 executions. Kotkin believes the actual number of dead is closer to 830,000. This is footnoted to a report from 1953 from “Genrikh Iagoda” by Vinogradov. There is also a note about a commission from 1962-1963. Kotkin notes this is only for the NKVD and not by the regular police.

1936 should be taken into account too. That's when the purges started.

“I noticed this morning that a group of our Landsberg friends have been given their freedom this morning. These include...Schubert, Jost and Nosske. Schubert confessed to...supervising the execution of about 800 Jews...(referring to the order to clean up Simferopol)...Schubert managed to kill all the Jews (by Christmas 1941). Nosske was the one the other defendants called the biggest bloodhound....
Noel, Noel, what the hell.”
Benjamin Ferencz in a letter to Telford Taylor, December 1951

Jeffk 1970 wrote:I’m not sure where else to plug this in but Kotkin reports that during 1937 and 1938 the NKVD reported 1,575,259 arrests and 681,692 executions. Kotkin believes the actual number of dead is closer to 830,000. This is footnoted to a report from 1953 from “Genrikh Iagoda” by Vinogradov. There is also a note about a commission from 1962-1963. Kotkin notes this is only for the NKVD and not by the regular police.

Kotkins judgement should probably be ignored on this matter. As for the number of arrests it was actually 2.5 million [life and terror p.63]. The Number of executed is probably best rounded at 700,000 as Wheatcroft and Khlevniuk have done and as Getty suggests the number of those shot is not likely to increase as greatly as Kotkin has suggested imho.

« The Terror here is a horrifying fact. There is a fear that reaches down and haunts all sections of the community. No household, however humble, apparently but what lives in constant fear of nocturnal raid by the secret police. . .This particular purge is undoubtedly political. . . It is deliberately projected by the party leaders, who themselves regretted the necessity for it. »Joseph E. Davies

Denying-History wrote:Yagoda was primarily liquidated with the reason of his poor reputation. This is why Ezhov for example took control of the Kirov investigation considering he had good relations with a number of party members and didn't have police background. Bukharin as an example trusted that Ezhov would not fabricate information as he did during the 1930's purges. (Getty, "Iron Fist" p.1-2) Yagoda used blackmail in his post as well as threats that made him unliked and this was true for all of Stalin's subordinates in this position as his right hand of the NKVD, as Jörg Baberowski pointed out no one missed Yagoda when he was executed, no one missed Ezhov, and no one missed Beria when he was executed by Khrushchev. (See Scorched Earth.)

Stalin also had great personal dislike of Yagoda - he admired his ability in seeing to his cruel work, but found him personally unsettling (which says a lot). Montifore writes that Stalin referred to him as "the creature" on a few occasions, and maintained a record of Yagoda's corrupt behavior as an eventual pretext for his inevitable departure.

The real founder of the Soviet terror machinery was Felix Dzerzhinsky. No discussion on it can be made without mention of him. Stalin was close allies with him politically at the time of his death in 1926.

Jeff_36 wrote:Stalin also had great personal dislike of Yagoda - he admired his ability in seeing to his cruel work...

I really am not sure if that is true or not. Its mainly guess work as to what Stalin's personal feelings are, and if or not we have any good grasp of them. There are multiple probable reasons for Yagoda's removal, ranging between distrust to disloyalty. Yagoda’s reluctance to act on Evdokimov’s “evidence” (Wheatcroft "Agency and Terror" p.30), Yagoda's use of blackmail & threats and the general feeling of the party viewing him as corrupt (Getty "Yezhov" p.1-2), the possibiliy he was "on the side of the Right deviation" as Bukharin supposedly told Kamenev (Wheatcroft "Agency and Terror" 2007 p.30), that he was actually a member of the rightist opposition something which Stalin interpreted as a terrorist cell (Thurston, "Life and Terror" p.34), or the reason listed for his removal that he "proved himself incapable if unmasking the Trotskyist-Zinov’evist bloc" (Wheatcroft "Agency and Terror" p.39) meaning he didn't discover the Bloc till 1936 when both Stalin and Yagoda discovered the Bloc (Getty "Origins of the Great Purges" p.122 & Broué "Party Opposition to Stalin" in "Essays in Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism" p.106).

[Getty preposes the possibility that Stalin knew of the Bloc in 1933 but also entertains the idea that Yagoda was hiding the existance of the Bloc from Stalin. I am no so sure this is true, but this is what Broué suggests in "Party Opposition to Stalin" p.106-7]

Jeff_36 wrote:Montifore writes that Stalin referred to him as "the creature" on a few occasions, and maintained a record of Yagoda's corrupt behavior as an eventual pretext for his inevitable departure.

His citation or page number? I own his book but haven't really taken the time to read it. I don't like how its structured.

« The Terror here is a horrifying fact. There is a fear that reaches down and haunts all sections of the community. No household, however humble, apparently but what lives in constant fear of nocturnal raid by the secret police. . .This particular purge is undoubtedly political. . . It is deliberately projected by the party leaders, who themselves regretted the necessity for it. »Joseph E. Davies

Regardless of Stalin’s personal feelings, the fact remains that while Yagoda was “promoted” to First Deputy due to Menzhinsky’s illness, Stalin undermined his authority and gave operational control of the OGPU to those (Non Jews) that he trusted, Evdokimov, Messing, et al. During both Dekulakuzation and the Holodomor, he was essentially a glorified desk Jockey and Border guard while the more trusted Byalytsky and Evdokimov were given the important work and the freedom to do as they please, independently of their nominal superior, Yagoda.

If the Antisemites want to use mean old Yagoda - who was undermined and repeatedly passed over by his boss in favor of more trusted (Non Jewish) colleagues - as an “example” of the real position of Jews in the USSR, let them. Mean Old Yagoda does not help their case, at all.

NathanC wrote:Regardless of Stalin’s personal feelings, the fact remains that while Yagoda was “promoted” to First Deputy due to Menzhinsky’s illness, Stalin undermined his authority and gave operational control of the OGPU to those (Non Jews) that he trusted, Evdokimov, Messing, et al. During both Dekulakuzation and the Holodomor, he was essentially a glorified desk Jockey and Border guard while the more trusted Byalytsky and Evdokimov were given the important work and the freedom to do as they please, independently of their nominal superior, Yagoda.

If the Antisemites want to use mean old Yagoda - who was undermined and repeatedly passed over by his boss in favor of more trusted (Non Jewish) colleagues - as an “example” of the real position of Jews in the USSR, let them. Mean Old Yagoda does not help their case, at all.

Mind Jeff’s reply lacked such issues. It settled more with the issue of Stalin’s reasoning for the removal of Yagoda.

If you are curious for something to do with Soviet antisemetism - especially related to the purge - then I would recommend reading Pravda during the time or Rogovins “1937: Stalin’s year of terror” which has a chapter called “The Anti-Semitic subtext of the Moscow Trials”. As for Pravda a perfect example is an entry from January 31st, 1937:

Let the foulest of the foul, the furious enemy of the workers of the world, the fierce fomenter of a new war, Judas-Trotskii, know that the people’s wrath will not pass him by.

Approximately 200,000 people demonstrated in Moscow in temperatures below -27°C (-16.6°F) saying that they agreed with the Moscow trial verdict after the second trial. Signs at this event read «the court’s verdict is the people’s verdict».

Khrushchev gave the following speech:

By raising their hand against Comrade Stalin, they raised their hand against all the best that humanity has, because Stalin is hope...Stalin is our banner. Stalin is our will. Stalin is our victory

[Note: at this event Stalin never made any personal appearance.]

Source: Robert C. Tucker’s “Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941” p.407

« The Terror here is a horrifying fact. There is a fear that reaches down and haunts all sections of the community. No household, however humble, apparently but what lives in constant fear of nocturnal raid by the secret police. . .This particular purge is undoubtedly political. . . It is deliberately projected by the party leaders, who themselves regretted the necessity for it. »Joseph E. Davies

Some Jewish people were Bolshevists, which we now know to have been a failed movement, vulnerable to takeover by psychopaths like Joseph Stalin. Hitler used the term "Jewish Bolshevists" to justify his war of lebensraum. Deniers may repeat it, but I'm not seeing any "claim" to refute here.

The job of a skeptic is to investigate the unexplained; not to explain the uninvestigated.

Hitler and the Nazis didn't deploy the concept of Judeo-Bolshevism to support the war or German acquisition of lebensraum (in fact, there's background on why that cannot be so in the thread - the concept existed before the war and played a part in ideological battles independent of the war). I'd argue that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism was an important component of interwar anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology, that is, more than a cynical justification or pitch, part of a belief system.

As a serious proposition about how the world works, Judeo-Bolshevism has indeed been eviscerated in this thread. Saying that some Jews were Bolsheviks - just as some Jews were in the Bund, the Mensheviks, liberal and centrist parties, Zionist groups - and just as many more members of other groups were Bolsheviks - helps refute the myth as a proposition.

Sure, some Jews were Bolsheviks. Claiming that "they" caused the Revolution or the USSR (When prominent Jews like Kamenev and Zinoviev in fact opposed the October Revolution) or were responsible for the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD's crimes (when Yagoda had little influence and it was a non Jew, Evdokimov, who helped start its worst practices, and non Jews Yezhov and Beria who killed the most) is dishonest, hilariously stupid, and ignores reality and context.

NathanC wrote:Sure, some Jews were Bolsheviks. Claiming that "they" caused the Revolution or the USSR (When prominent Jews like Kamenev and Zinoviev in fact opposed the October Revolution) or were responsible for the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD's crimes (when Yagoda had little influence and it was a non Jew, Evdokimov, who helped start its worst practices, and non Jews Yezhov and Beria who killed the most) is dishonest, hilariously stupid, and ignores reality and context.

The main point is that there's a long history of Russian anti-semitism, vigorously PROMOTED by the Tsar. What would anyone expect from people who have been oppressed for so long, when they got a chance to be liberated? Of COURSE RUSSIAN Jews joined the Bolsheviks in large numbers.

In her autobiography "A Russian Tragedy" (reprinted by Tsentrpoligraf in 2010), Nina Sergeevna Alennikova (1893--1984) reports on what conditions were like in Odessa just before she and her husband fled to get away from the Bolsheviks. She does note that there were a lot of Jews among the Reds, but (perhaps inadvertently) she explains exactly why they were on that side of the fence:

Translation: Terror had broken out in the city. Many arrests were being made. The Jews were taking vengeance for everything on everybody. There were a lot of them in the Cheka and at the head of it. A sadistic Jewish woman turned up who killed with her own hands the officers who were being found and arrested. Right before our departure for Elizavetgrad, Kalugin was arrested. Sof'ya Nikolaevna was in despair and told us how it happened. "We were walking peacefully down the street when some guy ran up to us and said, "You're the bastard who used to call me a Yid in the Gymnasium!" He took her husband off with the police, who were right on the spot."...

The management of the Cheka consisted solidly of Jews. They were taking merciless revenge for past insults, for pogroms...

So, I don't know what Alennikova's views were on the matter, but whether intentionally or not, she did reveal the CAUSES of the Jewish proclivity for Bolshevism.

And let it be said, that was in the early days, before the horrors of the Communist system in Russia appeared.

Last edited by Upton_O_Goode on Sun Sep 09, 2018 7:49 pm, edited 3 times in total.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

The other aspect of this has to do with Lebensraum, which affected mainly Slavs, not Jews, and which the Nazis was justified on the basis the claim of superiority, putative need, and power, not simply Judeo-Bolshevism.

Excellent piece, about the slanting of history to paper over the fact that Jews were singled out for destruction, separate from other groups. The Nazis regarded Slavs as inferior human beings, but not as a poison circulating in society. That's a crucial distinction.

I might add that the Catholic Church did the same thing in its much-ballyhooed statement on the Holocaust, nowhere admitting that there was any actual collaboration between its clergy (like Bishop Alois Hudal) and the Nazis, and implying that the only thing Catholics were guilty of was not opposing Nazism strongly enough. They even had the temerity to "mug" the Holocaust by pretending that the Nazis who snatched Edith Stein were motivated by a hatred of...Catholicism! (That enabled them to canonize her as a martyr, even though the Nazis grabbed her purely and simply because she was Jewish.)

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

It's probably now been forgotten that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a treatise called "Two Hundred Years Together," hoping by it to promote mutual understanding between Russians and Jews. But of course, he was a Russian and a very conservative Russian at that. Try as he might, he winds up apologizing for the Tsarist government. He does say that antisemitism among peasants and workers in Russia was mostly confined to the Ukraine. Here are a few samples of what he wrote:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: As a matter of fact, neither the liberal Russian press nor the Jewish press ever accused the Russian people of inborn antisemitism. On the contrary, they insisted that antisemitism among the common people was artificially and vindictively created and whipped up by the government. And the very formula "Monarchy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism" was perceived in educated Jewish circles as directed precisely at the Jews.

(The formula comes from the founder of the movement known as the Black Hundreds, one General Uvarov, in the 1830s. I've always considered it the equivalent of "God, King, and Country." It's probably not exactly that.)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: But there were no pogroms in Central, Northern, or Eastern Russia...Nevertheless, pre-revolutionary Russia---not the Russian Empire, but Russia---was branded before the whole world as being rife with pogroms, as a government of Black Hundreds....but pogroms broke out always and only in the southwest of Russia...

The pogrom in Kishinev started on 6 April 1903, the final day of Passover and the first day of Russian Easter. (This is not the first time we see this tragic connection between Jewish pogroms and Christian Easter. That's how it was in 1881, and in 1882, and in Nikolaevo in 1899...)

Still, Solzhenitsyn wants to believe that the Tsar's intentions were good, that he really tried to protect the Jews, but was tragically frustrated by events, and that's the way he writes things up.

Along those lines, a couple of weeks ago, I posted a letter from the American legate in St. Petersburg in 1895 to his Russian counterpart. Here is what it said:

Clifton Rodes Breckinridge wrote:
Mr. Breckinridge to Prince Lobanow.
Legation of the United States,
St. Petersburg, May 5/17, 1895.

YOUR EXCELLENCY: I am directed by my Government to bring to the attention of the Imperial Government the refusal of the Russian consul of New York to visé passports issued by the United States to its citizens if they are of the Jewish faith.

As your excellency is aware it has long been a matter of deep regret and concern to the United States that any of its citizens should be discriminated against for religious reasons while peacefully sojourning in this country, or that any such restraint should be imposed upon their coming and going. Painful as this policy toward a class of our citizens is to my Government, repugnant to our constitutional duty to afford them in every possible way equal protection and privileges and to our sense of their treaty rights, yet it is even more repugnant to our laws and to the national sense for a foreign official, located within the jurisdiction of the United States, to there apply a religious test to any of our citizens to the impairment of his rights as an American citizen or in derogation of the certificate of our Government to the fact of such citizenship.

It is not constitutionally within the power of the United States Government, or any of its authorities, to apply a religious test in qualification of the equal rights of all citizens of the United States, and no law or principle is more warmly cherished by the American people…

Whether in response to this note or not, I don't know, but later that year, the Russians arrested a naturalized American citizen named Yablonsky and charged him with treason for the "crime" of becoming an American citizen.

It seems to me that Solzhenitsyn and others have a difficult case to make if they want to prove that the Tsar's government WASN'T anti-Semitic.

The relevance of all that to this thread is that, if you were a Jew in the old Russian Empire in 1920, you'd have plenty of bitter memories of discrimination and violence directed at you because you were a Jew. Naturally, you'd side with the people who overthrew the Tsar. And again, the vengeance Alennikova writes about occurred during a Civil War, when there were plenty of excesses on both sides.

We've seen above how the USSR wrote up the history of the Great Fatherland War so as to put Slavs and Jews on an equal footing as victims of the Nazis. I would add that in the post-war world, the Communist government began systematically keeping Jews away from the institutions of government. Solzhenitsyn also mentioned that in one of his early novels ("Cancer Ward" I think, but it may have been "The First Circle"), where he points out that the campaign against "cosmopolitanism" was purely and simply a campaign against Jews.

Last edited by Upton_O_Goode on Sun Sep 09, 2018 7:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”